L is for London Toy Soldier Show - 2 of 2

I must confess I didn't stay long at the show, and wasn't carrying much cash, but I bought a few bits off everyone I knew, and ended-up with enough for two posts of mostly interesting stuff!

 

I can't veer into 'new painted metal', but one should support one's mates in their endeavours, so I try to buy the odd piece off Matt from White Tower, and this lovely Mongol/Hunnish horse-archer came home with me, beautifully wrapped in tissue paper by Matt!

 

Three Reliable interwar 'doughboy' infantry from Canada, these used to be considered copies, but I think everyone now accepts they were a licensing deal, or cross-boarder mould-swap, as there's nothing in them bar the different marked bases.

 

Marx on the left, in the box, I believe he's called Bill Mason! Lido in the middle, the rider's lost most of his lasso, so I think the kindest thing to do, will be to pare-away the remnants, so he can concentrate on fighting the bucking bronco! An early kit figure, on the right, is the third American here!

 

Three from Eastern Europe, with two of the Drevopodnik figures from the former Czechoslovakia; a railway platform guard and a medic, while I think the third is what we call a fake, a deliberate attempt to deceive - I stand to be corrected, and he's marked Elastolin Germany.

 

But the material is all wrong, and I think this is an East German fake of something which, by then, was the other side of the wire? It looks to be a pumice type composition, not the correct wood-chip and linseed? If I'd been doing it, I would have stained the base with coffee before I painted the green on!

 

 

Obviously removed from a very big, probably mostly tin-plate jeep, this guy is a 'dolly' rubber, probably PVC, with a mostly-polystyrene gun, which had a glowing-tip at some point I suspect, there's the remains of wiring up the barrel (so also battery operated/supplied)?

 

And there's what appears to be the remains of a mechanism for traversing, probably as the jeep went along? The figure's roughly in the four-inch bracket, and his toes are pined-trough the plinth and the pins have then been heat-sealed.

A Starlux diver, bought to compare with the smaller ones, the Dinky one and the unpainted (Solido?) ones, he's the full 54mm, while I don't know the maker of the colonial soldier, but he's another French figure I think?

A Charbens press-ganger, LB (for Lik Be of course) Indian girl and one of Cherilea's Elizabethan types, an eclectic trio, but all nice enough samples, clean and with good paint!

 

Another trio of the Vilco copies of old Cofalu aluminium figures, except these are in a rather nice marbled red, hard polystyrene, so may be by someone else, I thought maybe Toumoulage, but without any evidence! I have a feeling, though, that I did get an ID for them in silver & bronze hard plastic at some point?

 

Whatever the truth, I have a growing sample of these now, in hard and soft plastic, painted and bare, and think they are among my favourite French figures, although only the four poses (the standing firer is missing here), so far?

 

A couple of Spanish bullfighters to finish, Reamsa I think, the one on the left is very brittle, and has been repaired and repainted at least twice, and is to be considered only a pose-sample, until a better one appears, and there may already be one in the stash?

N is for November's Sandown Park - Wild West, Animals and Odds

Winding-up the Sandown purchases from a month ago now, and it's mostly animals, and the Wild West, with a few odds & sods, cartoon, TV-Movie stuff and the like, to look at this time.

 

I have two beliefs about this set (which was a gift from John Begg, I think), one is that it's from the same series as the #445 Mobile Task Force, and Space Explorer sets issued by Gordy, Woolbro and others, this being one 'sock' instead of two, and a generic issue with no branding-overprint. The other is that we were bought a set each from Webb's the Newsagent, in Hartley Wintney, by Mum, one wet weekend, in the holidays!

 

There was a two-sock Fort Cheyenne under the 445-code, but that had a version of the fort, and different figures/horses, so this may be a lookie-likey , and leaves the first belief questionable for now, the second belief is 100%, I well-remember the colour samples, and trying to wiggle the horses hooves into the carpet fibres to keep them standing up!

 

I bought a second pirate set from the same chap as last time, and it's already been opened and shot for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so a couple of months after the last one, and there are already two folders ready for next year!

 

A  mix of HK smallies, including several sub-piracies of the 2nd version knights, in red, I'd had a few yellow ones but I think these are new, usually you find both the Giant originals and the copies in silver or black. They probably belong on the horses to the right, but this is how they came!

 

Someone tried to 'mend' a broken tail, by rolling a scrap of faux-suede up, very tight, setting it alight, and stuffing it up the horse's jacksie! Given how common these are, and how many would come in even a small 6d set, that was a hell of an effort! Probably a 'favourite' horse? Kids are a bit like that, you can have fifteen white horses in the bag, but if one's slightly grey and becomes your favourite, you'll move Heaven & Earth to keep in going!

A rather tatty 2nd generation copy of one of the Hong Kong dogs we looked at in a couple of round-up posts a year or two ago, and the smallest King Kong in the world! Certainly the smallest I've seen, who wasn't moulded into a resin Empire State Building keepsake!

 

Probably a 1d-1¢, gum-ball capsule prize or Christmas cracker novelty, it really is tiny, less than 20mm! In all other respects it's the same as all other HK gorillas; soft polyethylene, with a basic MADE IN HONG KONG mark.

 

A sample of broken Cherilea dinosaurs, which Adrian gave me from his bits box. Useful nevertheless, against colour variations, or even to combine with others into dodgy Dr. Moreau subjects at a later date? I mean they are so rare these days, due entirely to their brittleness, that some are better than none, and they will be added to a bigger sample with some better ones we have seen here, previously, at Small Scale World.

 

Two Britains copies, a rather nice Hong Kong Herakd clone, from Hong Kong! And a damaged sub-scale rendition of the war-dancing Swoppet, also from the colony of intellectual property crime!

 

Kinder, all 1980's, I think. If you were to 'age' Kinder like comic-fans age their stuff, these would be 'silver age'! The head and hat, is from a slightly different set to the complete figure, I think, while the fire-appliance with two mini plug-in firefighters was late 80's, and I actually kept a few of the tractors at the time, so there's a tub of these to add-to, or cannibalise from, to make whole examples.

 

Damaged guard from Cherilea's executioner set, another Invicta dinosaur, a couple of Esci Americans and a partial pig, in the style of the Xandria key-rings, but all 'ethylene, and probably from another source?

 

Four 'funnimals', and all probbaly Holly rather than Lik Be, certainly the llama-like and squirel-thing come in a set with the known Holly guitar-turtle, while the cow was issued by Mail-Order outfit Colonial Studios, with a set of otherwise realistic (Briatins copies) farm animals.

 

This is just marked Hong Kong, but is not a bad rendition of Disney's Pluto, and holds-up against the Marx, Heimo, and early-Schleich stuff of the 1970's, a lump of stable-PVC, I guess the ring is the remnants of a key-chain?

 

More of the cartoon mini-animals often credited to Kinder, but which predate Kinder by a decade or two, and were issued as carded 'families', as gum-ball machine prizes and through other such novelty avenues. Kinder would issue similar 'hard plastics' in the 1980's, but usually larger models.

 

UK Cereal premiums, haveing other outlets elsewhere, here they were all cereal, with two jig-toys, three of the Aristocat figures and a Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout, and while we now know Brian could have been a Wavyline promotional, I think in this shade of blue, he might be a European ice-cream premium.

 

I think we might have the Little Baby Jesus (or Moses?) in red here, a rather tatty Marx Snow White (from Swansea?) and a lovely survivor of Japanese blow-moulded lightness, in the probable 'styrene copy of an earlier celluloid Santa Claus.

N is for November's Sandown Park - Sci-Fi &etc.

On to the odd-and-sods of the last show, and these are a bit of a mix, nothing exciting, but it's all grist to the mill, and there's always something new!

 

I think the devil is probably a rather naff Valentine's Day 'thing', but it IS a bendy! While the green chap, also a bendy, is probably more modern, and wasn't easy to shoot, but I decided to leave him in his crinkled bag for now. He has something of the Muppets about him?

 

Straight from a shop-stock / counter display box, three colours/poses of the Cherilea 60mm astronauts, interesting that the whole box, only had these three poses, the non-EM2 Bullpup armed chaps? And colours tie-in with the Tibidabo issues, so I think it's fair to say the Italians just bought-in the product, but never had the tools?

 

If there's anything exciting in this post it's the left-hand of these two from Yolanda, of Spain, being a large Anime/Manga type robot, Marked Toei, while the other chap is marked Troma I think, the US pulp-Video Nasty producer, and both are the earlier polyethylene, some Yolanda were later issued in a softer PVC-substitute.

 

Adrian gave me this, his head is broken-off, so will need pining at some point, but in the last few years several whole, and part, Cherilea Batmans and/or Robins have come in with one or two bases, so I'll sort them all into the best pair and Blog them again properly, one day!

 

'Gygax' spikey, one of the Crossbows & Catapults figures mentioned the other day, home-painted and play-worn, he needs a good clean, along with a Bandai Power Ranger's villain - I think!

 

What looks like a 1:48th scale aircraft kit's gunner, and one of the Aurora figures from the Lost in Space set with the rock-throwing cyclopean alien. He's lost his hand, but as a first sample, will do for now, although I may have these in white-plastic (Mobius) somewhere?

D is for Dustbin Lids

That's 'lid' as in helmet, not top, I know, it doesn't really work, but there you are, or, here we are! I want to leave this up for a day or two, so procrastinated and posted nothing for nearly two days while I thought about it, heay-ho! I'll still leave it up for a while, which will give me time to photograph a fantastic parcel from Chris Smith, which has all sorts of goodies (and bad guys) in it!

 

We're looking - in depth - at the First Version, Cherilea, 'Swoppet' Knights, here, because I have been lucky enough to go from a handful of bits to a master-collection, in less than two years. With a small but significant purchase at the Plastic Warrior show back in 2024 (possibly from Adrian at the now defunct Mercator), a smaller bag at PW this year, and the box above them which was a private purchase, to which I added a helmet (which had almost certainly fallen out of one of the three samples, and a plume, from a bits-lot.

 

There may be a few more in storage somewhere, but unlikely to make much difference to the whole, above. And the point of this post is to try and pin-down all the variables, a task which I may fail at, and which Matt Thier may have done a better job of back in the late 2010's in PW's magazine, when he went through all the Cherilea swoppets in some detail.

 

Poses first, and I am confident there are only six figures, five knights and this kneeling archer, who's a bit large, and a bit gawkish in posture, but would slip in-between the Britains and Lone Star chaps, but dwarf them slightly!

 

He is the only pose who doesn't wear a helmet, so his head is always painted, and a good one has three or even a formal four-count, of small arrows stuffed in his tube-quiver. 

 

But he comes in two versions, some with a 'ring hand' and the bow stuffed through the hole, some with a 'stud-hand' and the bow attached with a small plug-hole and stud, at the hand-grip. I have no idea which came first or why they may have replaced one with the other, as they both seem to work well, But maybe it's easier to lose the bow (even in the shop-stock boxes, at the store), from the plug-together version, and so that was the earlier, replaced one?

 

Three sword fighters, and this one seems to be the only one to officially get the cloak? Striking down, overarm, he's about to make a mess of someone who lost their footing, or who has tired, from existing wounds?

 

Striking around at waist height, he's in a fight to the death with an equal!

 

Ready, or parrying with his shield.

 

The standing waiting chap, never that useful in a fight, and I don't know if either lance is correct, the one with the dragon is associated with the mounted 2nd type, from the Sharna-Ware years and the rather compact castle play set, while the nicely, vicious-looking one is lovely, but the colour's not quite matching anything else?

 

The sixth sculpt is also a swordsman, but easier to separate out as he's striking overhead with both hands.

 

I've only noticed two different heads, one looking more like Charles I, the other looking more like a page-boy, or a Conquistador, but I must confess I didn't look that carefully, so there may be more. And while the archers' always have painted hair, it seems they gave-up painting the head inside the helmets quite quickly, with unpainted being more common than painted, overall.

 

Helmets, there are six dustbins, and two more traditional closed Burganets, but as I only have single examples of one or two, there may, by extrapolation, be more? And that's the rule for all the following!

 

I should point out that while they are mostly looking forwards in the upper shot, and backwards in the lower shot, it's not that simple, with the ones on either end of the row possibly facing forward in the lower shot and vise-versa, while the second from the right isn't clear at all! I also noticed the white plume is a fourth design! 

 

Single-headed Imperial chickens and two designs of cross, on the classic 'shield' shaped shield, of 13/14th century design, with a raised edge. A plug on the hand pushes through the shield and into the decorative element.

 

Earlier 11/12th century lozenge, or 'kite' shields with a more ornate chicken (looking the other way) and a fleur-de-lys (or, 'lis, a stylized lily or iris symbol, associated with French royalty, and symbolizing purity and the Virgin Mary). These shields seem to have been both moulded poorly, and then fettled poorly, and can be lumpy, misshapen or both!

 

I also have a double-headed chicken, but it's missing a wing, and all these are on the more decorative 15th century shields, which also have the raised rims.

There are two versions of three-point plume, and both seem to have sub-variants, which may be generations, or multiple cavities? This is the 'tumescent' one with two pointy-uppies and a drooper.

 

While the other variant has two droppers and one sticky-uppy, and is therefore the 'limp' one! Again, signs of different versions or cavities?
 

The only other crest design I have is a Wyvern (four limbed dragon), and again, as with helmets, shields, and shield achievements, I have only one of some of these, so there may well be more. So if you have items not shown here, or obvious variations, let us know!

 

All references to chicken/s should read eagle/s, I blame Artificial Intelligence!